


J'ai Seulement Les Mots Forts.

by fleshlycherry



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M, Gen, this was my life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-03
Updated: 2011-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-18 22:13:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/193876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleshlycherry/pseuds/fleshlycherry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The not really fictionalized accounts of two afternoons I spent with a professor in the university coffee shop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. “Tu veut de la crème?”

“Tu veut de la crème?”

His cheap wooden swizzle stick fumbles to catch the heavy canned whipping cream on top of her drink.

“I don’t know why you intimidate me, but you do.” She blurts it out quickly because it needs to be said. “I never have the words to say what I want to and I always feel like I don’t say anything intelligent.”

“No.” He reaches a hand over, touching the spoon next to the cup instead of her fingers wrapped around it at the last minute. “I’ve been in school longer than you. I have a Ph.D.” He shrugs as he speaks, and laughs a little. “I’m older than you.”

“I know.”

He looks shocked for an instant before smiling again and she is mortified.

“I didn’t mean it like that!”

He makes a dismissive gesture with one hand and they keep talking. They slide in and out of two languages with more ease that she would have imagined while they speak of truth, and poetry, and art simply for the sake of art. Of the vanity in the thought that for something to have value it must be useful. In the end, her hot chocolate is cold and his coffee is gone.

Perhaps she would have liked it to end with their cheeks pressing together, first one side then the other, because that would be all she would allow herself. It ends with the promise of his poetry and the insistence of his first name while he has never spoken hers.


	2. Absent Minded Professor

He lives up to the stereotype of absent-minded professor and she spends the next two hours studying.

 _siliceous band around the Antarctic mostly diatoms, band at equator mostly radiolarians_

This time she buys the coffee and they talk of more mundane things. He wishes he could wear jeans, but the consensus of professors doesn’t allow him. She laughs and tells him that the science proffs haven’t heard about that yet. She admits to being a bad student; to skipping and not studying as much as she should.

He smiles, “But you always came to my class.”

“I did.”

This time more is said here than probably should have been, but by the time either realizes it is too late. Once again his brings up the differences in their ages and she finally calls him on it.

“How old are you?”

There is a long pause before he answers but the number is less than she had been guessing. Still, when she was thirteen, he was older than she is now. Sometimes, she says, she feels that difference.

But that isn’t what this is about, he protests. It’s just a girl in class he thought was interesting and getting to know each other. This isn’t about something turning into a relationship he says; and now she knows it is

“We’re just people who have coffee.” She says.

“Exactly.” He sounds too relieved.

This time their hands do touch and his are warm like she knew they would be against her permanently cold fingers.

This time their cheeks press together, first one side then the other, because this time everything is different.


	3. J'ai Seulement Les Mots Forts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent quit bit of time during my mid-university years chaneling Michèle Lalonde and having _feelings_ about Anglo-assimilation (My grandfathers were Francophones but chose not to pass the French on to my parents, and all my French I learned from school/uni).

J’ai seulement les mots forts.  
Les mots noirs et blancs, les mots   
Qui tombent like bricks.

Give me words douce et méphitique,  
And give them to me harder.

Dites-moi que anglo privilège  
Makes my life easier.  
Dites-moi que c’est super bon de dire « hello »  
And hear it right back.

J’ai seulement les mots forts.  
To hear myself say « Bonjour. Je m’appelle…»  
Quand je veux parler the horse.

Give me les enfants d’assimilation   
And give me an army.

Dites aux mes grand-pères que I speak leurs langue,  
Que quelque fois I don’t need les surtitres.  
Dites-leurs que I understand les mots,  
But not la blague.

J’ai seulement les mots forts.


End file.
